Throw in
Mobile app design for my first project with General Assembly
DURATION:1 week sprint (Feb 2022)
the brief:
My challenge was to design an app that solves a problem my course mate was experiencing. Tom plays in a 6-a-side football team and told me about the trouble he has finding someone to play when his team is short of a player.
Through a series of interviews, prototypes, testing, and a couple iterations, I created ‘Throw in,’ an app that allows football players to choose from available stand-ins and invite them to their game.
TEAM: Solo project
MY ROLE: Completed user research, conducted usability tests, finishing with a low fidelity clickable prototype.
TOOLS & SOFTWARE: Pen & paper, Figma, Zoom, Otter
Read the case study in full on my Medium page!
process: I followed the double diamond design process.
PROCESS
understanding the user
Interviewed 4 football players to understand problem space and how they are currently solving the problem of being short of a player
Created an affinity map to identify the key findings:
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being short of a player is a frequent problem and often at short notice
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users would ideally find a player who can play at the same skill level and play in a specific position
defining the problem
Built up a persona based on the interview trends, Sam, a young professional in London who plays football every week in a local league but his team are frequently short of a player
Mapped a user journey for Sam to identify opportunities and formed his problem statement:
Sam needs an easy way to find an available football player to invite to his game so that he has a full team because teammates often drop out at short notice.
The key ‘How might we’:
HWM help Sam find an available player easier and spend less time on his phone doing it?
Testing and ideating solutions
When Sketching I began with Crazy 8s exercise before developing the best solutions, mapping out the screens involved in the users happy path
A key feature my design includes is the ability for the user to send an available player a game invite that expires after a set amount of time.
Created a clickable prototype and ran observed usability tests on 4 users, asking them to complete tasks and voice any confusions they had.
With this valuable feedback I iterated on my solution finishing with a mid-fidelity prototype .
OUTCOME
Screen flow as a user opens the Throw in app, sends a timed game invite, ending in the chat box with the invited player.
Walk through of the final solution
conclusion
My user backed persona, Sam, needed an easy way to find available football players to invite to his game.
The solution, ‘Throw in,’ is a simple but effective app on which Sam can easily find players that are available and and send them a game invite which expires.
This allows Sam to put a time pressure on the invited player ensuring that he doesn’t waste too much time waiting on a response.
reflections
I really enjoyed this first project on the General Assembly course. It taught me that in order to create a product that is user centric, it’s important to not to focus on the solution, but rather on the user and their needs and pain points.
It was challenging to ignore my assumptions, and I acknowledge that there were more questions I could have asked at the user interview and usability testing stages.
It’s tough but motivating to be the one responsible for giving a voice to the real user.
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